Amen, Pastor Isaac, I couldn't agree more with your post.
Fortunately, oil company CEOs have a friend from Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski:
Quote:
Murkowski Blocks Oil Spill Liability Cap Increase
Just now, as expected, Robert Menendez sought unanimous consent for the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act of 2010, which would raise the liability cap on oil spills from $75 million up to $10 billion. And it would have surely passed. Big Oil needed one Senator to raise an objection and fend off those who want fair compensation for people unwittingly affected by the underwater gusher in the Gulf and other disasters in the future. And they found her in Lisa Murkowski...
...“I do think we need to look at the liability cap, but we need to be careful of unintended consequences of just picking a number,” she concluded. And she actually tried to turn this into a fight for the little guy, saying that smaller oil producers wouldn’t be able to get insurance with that kind of liability cap, and that it should be structured in a way that “doesn’t give big oil a monopoly over the entire OCS (Outer Continental Shelf).”
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As you can see from the above, Senator Murkowski is fighting for the
little guy. She doesn't want to give Big Oil a monopoly (even though we already have it). Rather, she wants to encourage mom-and-pop oil companies, who obviously couldn't afford a $10 billion liability limit. I know for sure that my mom and pop couldn't have afforded anything that cost $10 billion. In fact, they couldn't even afford to buy me a new pair of shoes, so I was forced to wear Salvation Army hand-me-downs. That's why when they got cancer years later (when I was already a billionaire) and came to me begging for money for chemotherapy, I instead sent them a used pair of shoes. Anyway, it's their fault they got cancer - they should have had better sense than to drink well water after my company built a toxic waste dump just upstream from their farm.
But I digress. I think it's really unfair that private companies face any legal liability whatsoever. Mom-and-pop businesses like Goldman-Sachs, Boeing, Halliburton,
Enron, Exxon-Mobil, etc, will have to shutter their doors if they continue to face frivolous lawsuits from people who have been bankrupted and/or poisoned by their products. Indeed, all this harassment is why mom-and-pop businessmen like me have to get second passports in countries with no extradition laws, and keep our funds in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
"Whoops!" Mom-and-pop oil refinery in Texas.
Getting back to the issue at hand - where in the Constitution does it say that you can't dump oil into the ocean? Our founding fathers would be appalled if they knew that a mom-and-pop business like BP would be forced to pay $75 million for shutting down the entire Gulf of Mexico fishing and tourism industries.
Actually, it's not really BP that shut down the fishing industry. Rather, it's Big Government. The terrorist EPA and FDA are trying to destroy the seafood industry. There's absolutely nothing wrong with those oil-soaked fish and shrimp - all you need to do is wash them off, and they're fine. That petroleum taste kind of grows on you.
And as for the tourists, I see no reason why they shouldn't continue to enjoy the Gulf Coast. Black sand beaches in Hawaii continue to draw visitors:
Hawaii
What difference does it make if the beach sand is naturally black, or artificially colored? Lying on the newly-black Gulf Coast sand is perfectly safe, as long as you wear a wetsuit and don't strike a match.
Florida
In short, I think it's time for the federal government to get out of the way, and let the free market reign. Of course, a few trillion in bailout money to mom-and-pop companies like mine would help to grease the wheels of the economy.